Paper Report #2

I found both articles to be an interesting read. It was Beal’s article on David

Tudor’s contribution to the Darmstadt School that really caught my eye. Similar to
Aaron Copland and his travels to Russia, David Tudor traveled to Darmstadt in West
Germany to collaborate on creating new music while disseminating new music from
the United States through lectures and performances. This is around the time where
serialism was beginning to lose its popularity amongst new composers and chance
operation music became popular.

In October 1954, Tudor was traveling with John Cage in West Germany to both
perform and promote American Experimental music to the European masses. When
the two performed their music at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the audience was
taken aback. The event itself was deemed controversial and garnered a considerable
amount of negative feedback. If I were an audience member from that time period, I
would probably recoil in shock too. Unlike serialism, chance music, like that of John
Cage’s or Henry Cowell’s, is completely random and there is no way to replay the
same realization of the composition twice. Despite the criticism, both the American
composers continued on their tour of West Germany. When they performed in
Cologne, they came across Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen turned out to be an
important figure for Tudor and his influence in both Cologne and Darmstadt. It was
through Tudor’s connection to Stockhausen that he was able to meet Wolfgang
Steinecke, the director of the Darmstadt summer courses. This resulted in Tudor
influencing the new composers of the time and the mass dissemination of new music
through lectures and performances in Darmstadt. The Darmstadt summer courses
he was invited to lecture for took place between 1955-1959 and again for the final
time in 1961. Tudor’s presence during those years would have a lasting impact on
the history of new music in West Germany.

The Darmstadt school was a collection of new music composers from Europe
and the United States who experimented with avant-garde sounds for their
compositions. This was where a lot of American composers were able to ironically,
find out about what new techniques and schools of thought were happening in the
United States in regards to experimental music. Despite the collaboration between
the composers, there was a division on how experimental music was seen between
the American composers and their European brethren. As quoted by Amy’s article,
“Darmstadt 1958 was a ‘high time of collision between a kind of American
iconoclastic attitude and the European elitist intellectual organization thing’”. In other
words, the European composers were more interested in the theory or reason behind
the composition while the American composers were interested in creating and
performing the indeterminate pieces for the sake of creating. As Beal put it in her
article, the Americans “refused to let a crisis in theory equal a crisis in sound”. The
American view on indeterminate music reminded me of the intellectual art movement
of Dadaism from the 1920s and Neo-Dadaism of the 1960s.